Life In A Day: Youtube’s top cultural contributions

A selection of some of the most significant contributions YouTube has made to
culture

By Laura Barnett

3:33PM BST 03 Jun 2011

Youtube: it's not all tumbling kittens, BMX stunts and laughing babies. As proven by the cinematic release of Life In A Day, Kevin Macdonald's experimental film edited from 4500 hours of thousands of people's Youtube footage, the video sharing website can also be a surprisingly nifty medium for communal artistic creation.

Here's a selection of some of the most significant contributions YouTube has made to culture

Musicians from all over the globe auditioned by video for a place in YouTube's Symphony Orchestra. The finalists, whittled down to 101 musicians from 33 countries, converged on Sydney last March for a week-long festival and a live performance at the Sydney Opera House.

OK, so it's not quite the Berlin Philharmonic, but as an indication of the internet’s power for bringing disparate music-lovers together, it's unsurpassed.

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Not to be outdone, composer and conductor Eric Whitacre last year asked singers from around the world to record themselves singing one part from his ethereal polyphonic piece, Sleep. He received 2,051 entries from 58 countries, all of which he spliced into an almost seamless multi-tracked performance.

Whitacre's music may be a little on the saccharine side for some (even, dare I say it, soporific in nature as well as name), but there's something genuinely moving about hearing so many parts sung at once.

There's been a massive surge of interest in ‘street dance’ over the last few years, helped in no small part by the potential of the internet for spreading information about what was once an underground dance subculture.

At the forefront of the net-based street dance circuit is the Turf Feinz troupe, a professional dance crew based in East Oakland, California. Early videos of their pitched "battles" (adrenalin-fuelled performances in which rival dance crews would compete to show off their best moves) got thousands of hits. They even have their own YouTube channel.

Last summer, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation - the funding body behind the Guggenheim network of museums in Venice, Bilbao, Berlin and New York - joined forces with YouTube to launch a competition for "creative videos". Anything from animation to music performance and short films was permitted, as long as the submissions were "innovative, original and surprising".

The judges received 23,000 submissions which were trimmed down to a shortlist of 125. Of these 25 videos, chosen by a panel that included film director Darren Aronofsky and artist Douglas Gordon, were then shown at the New York Guggenheim last October.